What an odd book. Or perhaps that should read books, because I'm not sure Kevin Telfer ever quite works out what he is writing. He starts with a terrifically promising donnée, the Allahakbarries, a team founded by JM Barrie in 1887 which played village cricket together more or less every summer until the eve of the first world war. As well as its guiding force, who brought more than a touch of the Peter Pans to its hit-and-miss performances, the team called on the varying abilities of Arthur Conan Doyle (a very good cricketer who once dismissed WG Grace), EW Hornung (creator of gentleman, cricketer and thief Raffles), Jerome K Jerome, AA Milne, PG Wodehouse, and a score of other late Victorian and Edwardian writers and artists.

There should be riches enough for half a dozen books, despite the fact that details of many of the games the Allahakbarries played are sketchy. Barrie's wonderfully dry observations are themselves almost worth the entrance fee. Of the useless Jerome, he said: "He was a great cricketer, at heart." Has a comma ever been more adroitly used? He describes another hapless performer as "an invaluable man on the train going down [to the match]. Very safe bat in the train. Loses confidence when told to go in." As captain, he issued nine "hints" to his players. Number one: "Don't practise on opponents' ground before match begins. This can only give them confidence." Barrie claimed his team was so named because two renowned explorers had told him "Allahakbar" meant "Heaven help us", but he was a notoriously unreliable memoirist.

This comedy is good, and there is plenty of it. The French player who when the umpire called "over" invariably left the field thinking the game was at an end. The defeat against the Surrey village of Shere in the Allahakbarries' inaugural match, in which the locals made what Barrie called a "goodly" score (ie so many the scorers gave up counting) and the Allahakbarries mustered 11 – "The general feeling was that [we] had been beaten but not disgraced," he said phlegmatically. The match, not on this occasion involving the Allahakbarries, in which Conan Doyle's flannels were set on fire when a quick delivery rapped him on the thigh while he was batting, igniting a box of matches in his trouser pocket. Marvellous stuff. The Conan Doyle tale even mirrors the famous story of Tom Stoppard setting his pads alight by dropping his cigarette into them while keeping wicket for Harold Pinter's equally celebrated XI, the Gaieties.

There is a lovely comic memoir of a theatrically inclined group of public-school chaps led by an idiosyncratic little Scotsman lurking here, which we might happily fit into the tradition of Archie Macdonnell's England, Their England (another Scot looking for a place in English society) and Hugh de Selincourt's bucolic fable, The Cricket Match. But that is not the book Telfer wants to write. He is aiming for something more ambitious and keeps dropping random clues about his undertaking: the imminence of war; the tragedy of a doomed generation; the way Barrie used cricket as an antidote to a world that was losing touch with its pastoral antecedents; his surrogate father role with the parentless Llewelyn Davies boys, who in part inspired Peter Pan; the role cricket played in Neverland. He is tentatively driving at some vast thesis that pulls together cricket, the public school ethos, empire, war, exploration (Barrie was a friend of Captain Scott, and several explorers played for the Allahakbarries), male sexuality and Edwardian literary escapism, but it's beyond his reach. He can't even decide whether 1890-1914 was cricket's "golden age" or not. At times he seems to rubbish the idea, but by the end of the book he is fitting the Allahakbarries' quarter-century into a golden‑age narrative.

Instead of a rich tapestry which knits these grand themes together, Peter Pan's First XI at times descends into a bathetic list of great events that add up to surprisingly little. Thus, towards the end of the book, we get Milne joining the team in 1910 as the "last member" of the Allahakbarries (cue six pages on his literary career), a politician member of the team being beaten up by Suffragettes, a sensational innings in a first-class match in 1911 by a Nottinghamshire player who has nothing to do with the Allahakbarries, the death of Scott on his expedition to the South Pole in 1912, and the almost contemporaneous sinking of the Titanic (perhaps included because one of those killed was an artist who had played against the Allahakbarries). This is the kitchen sink approach to history, and it won't wash.

That is not to say the book is without merit. As well as the comedy, one gets the strong sense of Barrie as someone who both loved the game – I would guess from the photographs of him playing that he was better than Telfer thinks – and used it as an entrée to English society. He clearly enjoyed organising things – running a cricket team for 26 years is no easy matter – and liked to do it properly, with club colours, dinners and commemorative booklets. There is much of Pinter, who was similarly painstaking in his organisation of the Gaieties, here: both a strong sense of how the game should be played and a deeply theatrical recognition of its ritual, almost cathartic, qualities.

The book is deeply suggestive, without ever exhausting any of its numerous themes. It leaves you wanting to know more of Barrie and his odd collection of Allahakbarries – each of the major figures is, of course, well served by conventional biographies – and eager for a more coherent account of this pre-war Neverland. A chancy cameo, then, rather than a dutifully compiled double-hundred; an innings more suited to village cricket than a Test match. Which, in its way, is not inappropriate for a book about this most unlikely of cricket teams.